Posted 6 years ago on Nov. 19, 2012, 11:38 a.m. EST by therising
(6643)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

The last 14 months really have been an amazing breakthrough. When you take a step back to think about the big picture, it is really incredible. For so long I think so many of us as individuals felt like there was a huge gap. On the one hand, there were these giant elephants in the room (ever-growing income disparity, corporate takeover of our political system, human needs and environmental concerns taking a backseat to corporate needs).

And on the other hand was a feeble lapdog corporate press that was failing to even report on the elephants in the room. There were also (and still are) a whole lot of corporate forces making sure Americans are fully juiced on materialism and asleep to rising wealth disparity, environmental destruction etc.

It felt otherworldly to so many millions of us for years/decades to have such enormous and ever growing issues glaring us right in the face and yet there was no significant or widespread discussion of them. Bizarre.

And then all of a sudden Occupy burst on the scene and gave the "silent" majority who had felt it for so long a voice!!! Of course we as individuals and small groups had spoken up over the months and years but it wasn't until we joined together in a chorus collectively that the message broke through and captured the imagination of the nation, even the world. It has just been so incredible to see people in the streets, hear people from all walks of life around the country, around the world speaking their minds, speaking up for humanity in countless ways on thousands of fronts. It's also incredibly gratifying to see others outside of Occupy take heart from the courage of supporters of the Occupy movement (Walmart strike etc.). After all, once some speak up, others feel more inclined to do the same. The confidence grows and grows and Occupy supporters and participants continue to deserve a lot of credit for getting the party started.

Damn - I'm just so grateful it finally happened and will enjoy participating however I can and joining with others to help it grow and grow and grow until the main agenda is based on human needs instead of corporate needs. It's about damn time.

And it feels so incredibly good to realize how many millions of kindred spirits are out there, people who have been feeling the same way all along. Incredible. It turns out we're not alone. It turns out it's not just a few of us that feel this way. It turns out we are a huge group with massive power when we join together. It turns out that we are the 99%! Wow! What an incredible thing to realize that nearly everyone "in the room" has been with us all along.

Now we just need to take the idea, the simple yet powerful revelation that the needs of human beings and their children and grand kids and the environment should come before the needs of corporations.... We need to take that idea, that revelation and act on it, make it real in the world by INSISTING on it as a fundamental guiding principle. We must voice this insistence with the incredible strength that can only come from collective action. And we must do so relentlessly, with a joyful spring in our step as kindness in our heart. 1% of the population can't hold back 99% of the population for long. There's nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. And when it comes right down to it, the 1% feels the same hunger we do. All their expensive toys just blind them. In the end, what they need is our help to break through the crippling mindset of materialism just as we've all had to do again and again.

So glad to be on this journey with good people like you. I feel so lucky that we live in a time when we are able to witness and participate in such an historical breakthrough. Another world is truly possible. Indeed, the transformation is underway.

Wow. Nice gift. Just watched that. Fantastic and timely message. Many sincere thanks for dialing in the mindset this evening :). PS - Glad to see Gandhi, King, Mandela, JFK and John Lennon. And the beat goes on....

Here's an over 25 year old performance and live rendition and medley with other tunes, which always moves me every single time I hear it. Power to all your good works and here's hoping for 'therising' :

Can't see nothin' in front of me
Can't see nothin' coming up behind
I make my way through this darkness
I can't feel nothing but this chain that binds me
Lost track of how far I've gone
How far I've gone, how high I've climbed
On my back's a sixty pound stone
On my shoulder a half mile line

Come on up for the rising
Com on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight

Left the house this morning
Bells ringing filled the air
Wearin' the cross of my calling
On wheels of fire I come rollin' down here

Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight

Spirits above and behind me
Faces gone, black eyes burnin' bright

In the garden of a thousand sighs
Dancin' in a sky filled with light
A dream of life comes to me
Like a catfish dancin' on the end of the line

Permultas gratias tibi ago shadz . Just listened to both and it gave me heart. Between that and watching Manufacturing Consent today, I feel renewed and ready. Cheers to you and all your great gifts, comments and posts.

Agreed, "courage begets courage," and it is indeed a beautiful thing to see. Despite many years of working out of NYC, I have never felt so close to people the way that I do to my fellow OWS/OTS friends.

And the powers of evil ( yes evil ) are trying harder then ever to shout down sane conversations that are forwarding sane actions. Everyone buckle-up - because we have yet to see the real tantrums of the greedy manifest. The tantrums will be real - and they will be bad - before sanity and health can really make progress.

My internet experience is very limited - but one thing I have noted over this last year - is that social media has filled in a large area of coverage - information sharing ( articles documentaries petitions protest announcements etc ) that the corpoRAT media has purposely blacked out. Social media along with some internet news programs are providing the coverage that corpoRATions are denying the public.

Good point. The trick then, it seems, is to do whatever we can to facilitate the word spreading. Actions and initiatives need to speak to the heart and be communicated in a clear fashion. I've been wrestling with how we might achieve that with these 8 items. http://occupywallst.org/forum/you-may-have-seen-this-list-of-8-practical-goals-b/ . Any thoughts? (if you leave any comments related to that question, I'll look for them over at that other post :)

The trick then, it seems, is to do whatever we can to facilitate the word spreading. Yep - forward share circulate - all good information that one comes across.

Actions and initiatives need to speak to the heart and be communicated in a clear fashion. Yep - Different styles in how people communicate also helps - when I share something I place it in my frame of reference - this will not get everyone's attention or speak to them ( if you will ) - so the more people sharing information - the more communication styles being incorporated - the more people who are gonna notice/consider the information.

Thx again. Yep I also like good discussions with smart individuals such as yourself - as it not only helps to order ones thoughts - it also exposes one to different perspectives and often times a point of view or thought that one might not have considered otherwise.

I'm trying to picture what could be worse than the violent crackdown last fall on peaceful demonstrators whose goals were supported by half of the American public. Are you picturing the dystopian Orwellian world of the film V for Vendetta where China-like propaganda rules the day and everyone is under surveillance?

Worse. In a way. I am expecting to see a major loss of jobs in retaliation over pressing for a living wage for 1 ........ from there???.....let's just say the environment is in for a mauling.............and then?......................

The light will win out over the dark on this. There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come and the momentum is with the good forces. Those that perpetrate the bad stuff eat themselves from the inside out do they can't sustain the negativity. The positive forces, on the other hand, end up
snowballing into a virtuous cycle.

Really admire your positive and encouraging posts. So much that is posted here is negative. But the human spirit needs positive encouragement or it becomes discouraged and might give up. That is what the (R)ich want and expect will happen. But we can never allow that unless we want to enter a new dark age. The (R)ich are pushing hard for our enslavement and destruction. They view a massive reduction in world population as a good thing, because with dwindling natural resources they know even they are threatened (from a lifestyle perspective). So eliminating the "surplus population" (as Ebeneezer Scrooge called us) means maintaining their dominance over humanity, which is their first and foremost goal (even above wealth). That is why Occupy is so important and cannot be allowed to perish. It is not just important, not just vital, it is (in my view) sacred in its mission to restore balance. That which seeks imbalance shall not endure, because Nature itself operates upon the principle of balance and will, in her own way, restore that balance herself if we do not do it, and her way is frequently not pleasant. So we have a choice to force the (R)ich into compliance or else wait for Nature to reset things her way. Either way, balance will be restored eventually for that is how the Universe operates.

I feel that light starting to glimmer. It is just that feeling one has in the very early hours of the morning, when a very, very, subtle - a very incremental change begins to cast itself out over the gloaming.

At first one isn't sure it's there, or if it's real - but gradually it lifts, and in this gradual lifting we become aware that it is real, and suddenly our heart leaps with expectation, and at last the moment comes when the first rays of the sun pierce the sky, and we know that it's true, that the long hours of darkness are over, and that we will finally be welcomed into a new day, a new beginning!

What is this strange feeling taking hold of me now? - wait...holy crap, I feel positive - how did you do that? I did not think it was possible, dissecting and paying attention to these issues can be so disheartening. Thanks for this post - much needed!

I agree. It can really wear you down delving into all this. But if we pause now and then to see how our actions, words and organizations have made a difference, it can be very heartening. What we have going for us is the cat is out of the bag...and now that people are realizing that it's only 1% of the population that are really benefitting from the current arrangement, the momentum is with us. That idea can't be evicted from the consciousness. And all sorts of the things, the Walmart strike / actions being just one example, will happen as a result.

As you know, this energy and understanding help renew and energize environmental a actions, efforts to get the money out of politics and much much more. The jig is up in such a good way.

Well they are at least ran by people, and people make a lot of money from them. The top 1% of taxpayers represents 1,400,000 taxpayers, that is a lot of families, and remember it's always about the children. No doubt this must be done, but as we get closer to doing something there will be great push-back. Even within OWS one hears less and less about wealth inequality. Most of the people who were asked about it coming out of the polls thought wealth inequality was a major problem, it is up to OWS to make sure it gets major coverage.

I think people can feel that something isn't right they know too many people who work hard and can never seem to make enough. It is becoming true for more and more professions, air line pilots (if they fly the small planes), certainly teachers, many people who do work that at one time would raise a family no longer does. We must insist that labor costs be raised now.